


The Bunker Librarian

by thefreakfox



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Book References, Books, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-11
Updated: 2014-01-11
Packaged: 2018-01-08 09:50:38
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,521
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1131202
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thefreakfox/pseuds/thefreakfox
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sam knows that Dean loves books just as much as he does.<br/>But they don't talk about that.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Bunker Librarian

**Author's Note:**

> Okay so yesterday I found a gifset on tumblr that showed all the book references Dean made throughout the seasons. And because insomnia's a bitch and I am in possession of a smartphone, a tumblr app and a tumblr account, the gifset resulted in a rant on tumblr, which in turn resulted in this fanfiction. It took me like 12 hours (with beta-ing) to write this thing.

 

Many thanks to Sandy and Maria for bearing with me. You can find them both on tumblr [here](http://eierschalenblau.tumblr.com/) and [here](http://godyourefugly.tumblr.com/). They are lovely ladies, go talk to them!

 

* * *

 

“We started reading _The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime_ today”, Sam says as he puts down his bag on the rickety table that came with the rest of the interior of the house.

“That’s a Doyle quote”, Dean just says and keeps cleaning his gun. Dad gave him shit for not cleaning it yesterday, and he doesn’t want him getting even more pissed than he already is.

“A _who_ quote?”

“Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The guy that wrote all the Sherlock Holmes books, dude. I gave them to you like a year ago, didn’t you read them?”

Sam rolls his eyes (Dean just _knows_ he does, even though he’s not looking at his kid brother, but seriously, Sam’s eyes make _noises_ when he rolls them, Dean is sure of it) and shrugs.

“You weren’t at school today”, Sam says instead of actually answering and throws himself on the old couch that stands in the room. The house they’re staying in until the school year’s finished is not even close to halfway decent, but Dean likes that Sam can go to school and that he has his own room (sorta, at least. They still have to share, but there’s a desk in it and Sam can do his homework and Dean can lie on the bed and quiz him on all the things). Dean also likes that the house is close to the library, because he loves to go over there. Sometimes he doesn’t even read books; he just sits there and enjoys the silence and the smell of books, knowing that he’s save there. Nobody is making him do anything when he’s sitting in the library, his dad isn’t shouting at him or ordering him around. He can just _be_.

“Yup.”, Dean answers, and if Sam is annoyed at his monosyllabic answer, he doesn’t show it. Instead he gets up again, gets his book and starts reading. They sit in silence, the only sounds the occasional paper-on-paper scratch when Sam turns a page, or a soft _clink_ when Dean puts a part of the gun down on the table.

“Dude.”, Sam suddenly says. “Duuuuude.”

Dean looks up, a bit startled because he lost track of time. Instead of asking, he just waits patiently for his kid brother to elaborate.

“That kid in the book is hella weird. Who the fuck doesn’t eat things because they have a certain color?”

Dean is torn between giving him shit because Sam always adopts slang words as soon as they are staying somewhere longer than a week, and arguing with him about the book because, God, the kid doesn’t have a clue. He decides for the latter.

“You know how you don’t like eggplants and zucchinis because they feel weird when you chew them?” he asks and puts the part of the gun he is cleaning down. It’s much more interesting to talk about books than clean guns.

Sam nods, “Yeah, and?”

Dean grins. Oh, the kid _really_ doesn’t have a clue. “It’s the same,” he says. “Just because Christopher doesn’t like to eat brown things doesn’t mean it’s different from you not eating stuff that feels weird when you chew it. It’s the same, basically. You both don’t like things, and you both have reasons for it. I mean, seriously,” now he sits up straight, and he knows that he has to keep himself in check because if he doesn’t, he will start gesticulating soon and that shit is just embarrassing. “Think about it. Everything Christopher likes or doesn’t like, he always has reasons for it. The reasons might seem weird to you, but he never acts without reason. It’s all in the book; you just have to read it instead of being an intolerant little shit.”

Sam stares long at his older brother. “ _Christopher doesn’t like to eat brown things_ , he says. _Read the book_ , he says. Dean Winchester, are you telling me you actually _read_ the book and even remembered parts of it?”

Dean refuses to answer. It’s enough that Sam will tease him the next few weeks for it, he doesn’t have to give him more ammunition than he already has. If he goes back and reads the book again, because he remembers how much he liked it when he read it the first time, how he thought that Christopher was awesome, not stupid or different or disabled; how he thought that they had one thing in common in seeing the world differently – Christopher dividing the world in things he likes and he doesn’t like, and Dean dividing the world in potential monsters and civilians – he doesn’t tell anyone.

…

Sam has to write an essay on _The Curious Incident_ , and he gets an A for it. When Dean reads it, he sees that he included the origin of the title as well as the theory of Why Christopher Isn’t Weird in it. Dean grins and shoves Sam into the wall, because he was right and his brother is an idea-stealing little shit, but he’s nevertheless proud.

…

“ _In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat; it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort._ ”

Dean has read the book so often he can recite parts of it without straining himself, and while the Impala keeps _swishing_ on the road, the rain tapping on the window, he tells Sam the story of how Bilbo became a burglar.

They both sit in the back of the car, Dean leaning against the door, stretching out along the seat; and Sam leaning against Dean’s chest, silently sniffling because he got sick a few days ago, he’s still feverish and cannot sleep because his whole body “ _hurts, Dean, make it go away I don’t wanna be sick no more”_. Dean finds that Tolkien’s stories are soothing, and it seems like Sam feels the same; because the next time he looks down on his little brother, Sam has his faced burrowed in Dean’s chest, his left hand grabbing some of Dean’s t-shirt, still sniffling, but at least he’s asleep now.

Dean smiles down on him, feeling elated; Sam will get well again soon. He smiles until he catches John’s look in the rearview mirror. “If you’d only remembered how to hunt and following orders as well as you remember those stupid books”, his dad sneers and Dean stops smiling and feels suddenly very cold. “You stop reading them, you hear me? You’re a soldier, not a goddamn librarian, Dean.”

…

So Dean stops reading books. He loathes his dad for taking away the one thing he loves, but he obeys. He’s a good son, he takes care of Sammy. He can be a good soldier, too. He learns about skinwalkers and chupacabras and all the other things that go bump in the night. He learns how to deconstruct and reconstruct his guns without even looking. He learns to sneer just like his dad, and he sneers at Sam when he gets back from school with a new book he wants to tell Dean about; and he learns to hide the ache of his breaking heart when he sees how Sam’s face falls.

He also learns to sneak Sam’s books into his own duffel, and how to find spots to read in peace without anyone ever seeing him.

Except for Sam, and at first he’s scared that Sam will tell their dad, if only to get revenge for the last time Dean made fun of him for reading _The Catcher in the Rye_. But Sam doesn’t.

A few days later, Dean finds the book in his toolbox. He thinks about giving it back, thinks to make a quip about how Sam always leaves his shit lying around, and that he’s not his freaking housekeeper. Instead he keeps the book and reads it, and when he’s done, he puts it back in Sam’s duffel bag.

They start doing this all the time, Sam fake-forgetting his books in places Dean will find them, but not their dad. Sam’s good at that, Dean has to give him that. The few times John finds the books first, Sam totally aces looking sorry, looking like he didn’t do it on purpose but because he has his head in the clouds.

Dean sometimes envies him; Sam doesn’t seem to care as much about John giving him lectures on being a hunter, not a bookworm. He envies him for going to school and _liking_ it, when Dean has to recite exorcisms and learning how to take people down without them even seeing him.

Don’t get him wrong, Dean doesn’t like school. He may like books, and he likes making up his own theories as to why Hemingway’s style of writing is so colorful even when he refrains from using adjectives. But he doesn’t have to sit in a classroom for that. Knowing about maths isn’t going to help him gank a monster; and the chemical formula of Manganese Dioxide doesn’t stop a vampire from slurping humans like they are soda (it’s MnO2, by the way).

…

Dean starts looking forward to longer stays in a city almost as much as Sam does. When John is away on a hunt and Dean only has to care for Sam and himself and not about keeping his posture straight and following orders and all that stuff, it’s almost peaceful. His dad doesn’t have to _order_ him to protect Sammy, it’s not like Dean would just up and go and leave his kid brother alone. Sammy is his baby brother, for god’s sake. He carried him outside when their house was burning down; all Dean ever did was protecting him. He doesn’t like it when his dad says it’s his job to protect Sam; because it’s not. Making Sam his job sounds like he wouldn’t protect him voluntarily, but he does. When his dad first told him about monsters, the first thing on his mind was Sam; how he had to learn how to kill monsters to protect his little brother; and why hadn’t dad told him sooner? Something could’ve happened to Sam!

Dean might fail at a lot of things but never, ever would he fail at protecting Sam. That his dad thinks he would (because that’s how Dean understands John’s order to protect Sam: the message that if John didn’t remind him, he would forget to do it, that John honestly believes Dean would for one second forget to take care of Sam.) only makes him more determined to prove him wrong.

 

He gets furious sometimes about these kinds of things; when his dad tells him to do stuff he’d never consider not doing. Protecting Sammy is just one of these, keeping the salt lines intact and checking on them every night before he goes to sleep and every morning as soon as he wakes up is another. Keeping up with his exercises even though he hates them, and making sure nobody realizes that John isn’t actually living with them, but dumped them to go kill a monster somewhere.

Now that Dean finally dropped out of school, he has an insane amount of free time on his hands. Most of it he spends on annoying Sam when he’s not in school, or reading books when he is; he also got a part-time job stocking shelves in the supermarket a few streets away, so it’s not like he’s useless.

John won’t be back for the next two or three days, so Sam and Dean are completely content in just lying around and discussing Sam’s latest homework. They read ghost stories now in Sam’s class, and neither Sam nor Dean know if they should laugh or cry about it. If these people only _knew_ …

Dean ignores Sam’s rant about H.P. Lovecraft and Cthulhu in favor of speaking even louder and telling him that “No, Sam, you don’t understand, the topics changed over time. Like, at first there where haunted houses and objects and all that stuff, like in _The Monkey’s Paw_ , and later the people were haunted or possessed. Like in _A Tell-Tale Heart_. The guy goes completely off the bend because he thinks he can hear the heart beating, and all that. Or _Jekyll and Hyde_ , you can’t tell me that Dr Jekyll is one sick-“

Suddenly the door opens and John stands there, looking worse for wear and incredibly angry. “What did I tell you, Dean?”, he barks, crossing the room in four long steps, grabbing Dean’s shoulder and dragging him out of the armchair he was lounging in. “No more of these stupid books, I told ya!”

Even though Dean is now almost as tall as his dad, John can still throw him around like a ragdoll. Maybe it’s because for all the lessons on fighting and self-defense, Dean has never been taught to defend himself against John; the thought has never even crossed his mind, so he goes boneless in John’s grasps and hopes that Sam will not interfere, hopes that the kid is smart enough to stay out of it, but it’s already too late.

The blow Dean anticipates doesn’t come; instead Sam hangs on John’s arm, somehow managing to keep their dad from lashing out. “Dad, stop. _Stop_ , please, it’s not his fault, he didn’t do anything, he wasn’t reading or something like that, he was doing his stuff but I kept bugging him, I have a test tomorrow so I wanted to test some theories, it wasn’t his fault, stop, Dad, _please._ ”

It’s such a change to the atmosphere a few minutes ago, when the sun was shining through the window and they were bantering. Sam looked healthy and strong and _normal_ like he was just a kid, like he didn’t know what he knew; now he looks meek and his voice his high and he’s crying and Dean realizes that he himself is shaking. For once he doesn’t have a ready excuse for what he was doing; he wasn’t prepared for John coming home so early.

And then John just _stops_. He lets go of Dean and shakes Sam off, and he stands there, looking at his sons. “No more books, you hear me? It’s enough that one of you thinks he’s better than me, doesn’t have to be the both of you. Sam, go to your room. Dean, get the guns out of the car, they need cleaning.”

He leaves the room then, probably to find the closest liquor store or bar, Dean thinks, and they are left behind to stare at each other silently.

“Dean, I’m-“, Sam starts, but Dean cuts him off and stands up from where he was crouching, rolls his shoulders and guards his face. “You heard what he said, go to your room. _Now._ ”

…

They don’t talk about what happened that day. They never talk about anything anymore, and when Sam ‘forgets’ his books somewhere, Dean is more likely to throw them at his head than to read them. Sometimes Dean reads them first and then throws them at Sam’s head, but that happens less and less.

Sam gets that Dean is angry, he does, but he doesn’t understand why Dean never _does_ anything. John might be their dad, but he’s not god or whatever. He has his faults, too, but Dean doesn’t seem to see that. But Sam’s in his last year of high school and he has enough trouble with sneaking college applications to the post office, let alone write them all, so eventually he stops thinking about it.

That doesn’t mean he stops fighting with his dad, hell no. If anything, it gets worse with every application he sends away, each and every one of them a promise to himself that he will get out of this, that it will only be a little time longer. Sam doesn’t get why Dean stays; he could’ve walked away. He knows that it’s probably his fault, because Dean would never leave him, he knows that. Maybe Dean will walk away from John when Sam leaves. There isn’t much there to keep him, after all, is there? Sam sometimes wants to ask Dean to come with him; but he never does. It’s not Dean’s fight, after all. Sam doesn’t want to make his brother decide between him and John. Dean is loyal to a fault; so making him leave would either kill him because he’s disloyal to their cause and to John, or Dean wouldn’t leave at all, and Sam couldn’t stand that. If Dean leaves, he has to do it because he wants to, not because Sam made him do it.

So Sam sends his applications and sneaks away to call Bobby to ask if there’s been an answer yet, if there’s a college that wants to have him, crappy CV or not.

Later that year, Sam graduates. John isn’t there to see it, but Dean is; and his big brother shoves him into a wall and Sam knows he’s proud.

…

After Sam leaves for Stanford, Dean stops reading altogether.

…

Sam can’t stop forgetting his books in weird places. Of course he knows by now that there is no one to give them back, so he starts taking extra shifts at the place he works so he can afford to buy new copies when he doesn’t find his old ones. He misses Dean, and every time it gets too much, he leaves a book somewhere, anywhere – the kitchen on his floor of the dorm, various toilets, the library, in class rooms and shops all over the city. Some he places deliberately, in places he thinks Dean would find them – if Dean would be here, that is.

 (He breaks into a motel, one night, when he can’t sleep because he’s so homesick that he thinks he might throw up. He gets the irony of it, being homesick without ever having had a home, but that doesn’t help. He’s not homesick for some stupid house or motel room, he’s homesick for Dean. The motel is two towns over, Sam hitch-hiked there. He leaves a copy of Vonnegut’s _Slaughterhouse Five_ because he thinks Dean might like it, and he hates that he never got to talk with Dean about Vonnegut. When he’s back in his dorm room he scolds himself, Dean would never even come near Stanford, let alone rent a motel room there, and now he lost a book he really liked and has to buy a new copy, again).

Others he loses because he really forgets them.

It’s not like everybody knows him, but to a variety of people he becomes the weird kid that forgets books everywhere.

One day, as he is leaving the library, a girl comes after him and stops him. The girl is beautiful, with blonde, wavy hair and a mole right between her eyebrows. She gives him a book he doesn’t even recall to having taken with him this morning, says she’s called Jessica.

It’s a copy of Jack Kerouac’s _On the Road_ , and when he opens it, he finds that she has written her phone number right above the beginning of the story.

…

Dean doesn’t get near Stanford on purpose, okay? He doesn’t.

There had been a djinn in San Francisco and even though all he wants is to get on his next case, he is tired. So he stops at the next best motel outside of town (he _does not_ think that Sam would’ve liked the motel for its stupid name, and he certainly did _not_ skip the first two motels along the road) and rents a room for the night.

The interior design is just as tacky as the motel’s name, but Dean couldn’t care less (and if he thinks about maybe driving into Stanford tomorrow, scouting the campus for anything that might go bump in the night, it’s just because he’s like halfway there already and anyway, that’s nobody’s business but his own). He breaks the lock on the minibar easily, gets himself something to drink and starts looking for places to hide a hexbag or two. Instead of a good hiding place, he finds a copy of _Slaughterhouse Five_.

…

Now that he’s mostly hunting alone, Dean starts to buy books again, only in thrift shops, and most of the copies reek of some thing or other, but he doesn’t care about that. He starts to take notes on some of them, or underlining parts he really likes, just because he can; he does it in pen because he knows it would annoy the shit out of Sam. (He doesn’t miss Sam, he doesn’t. Sam left him; he doesn’t deserve to be missed.)

…

“Dad’s on a hunting trip. And he hasn’t been home in a few days.”

…

Sam swore to himself that he’d never go back to hunting. But Jess died because of him and he will get the motherfucker who’s responsible for it.

…

It’s hard, at first, learning the ropes again. Eventually, they gank Yellow Eyes, and Sam wishes losing people got easier over time, but it doesn’t. But at least he has books, and when he misses Jess too badly, he takes the old copy of _On the Road_ and just stares at the numbers on the first page, remembering how alive she had been. Only ever alive; he doesn’t want to remember her dead. If Dean sees it, he never says anything.

…

Sam slowly starts forgetting his books again, almost always in the near vicinity of Dean’s stuff, but they don’t talk about that, either. Most of the books he loses reappear sooner or later, but sometimes Dean still throws them at his head, muttering about personal space and chaos and how Sam is unable to keep his stuff where it belongs, and has he ever thought about the fact that if they have to move fast for some reason or other it will only slow them down when Sam has to collect all his shit first. Sam thinks that’s Dean-speak for “Nah, didn’t like that one, give me another one”.

…

“You should try reading Stephen King. Dude’s the shit.” Dean says one night over dinner. Sam almost chokes on his Greek Salad.

“What?” he asks, not sure if he heard correctly. Never in all the years has Dean started a conversation about books; well, at least not after the incident with the ghost stories.

“Stephen King, dude. Don’t tell me you’ve not at least heard his name? Didn’t they teach you guys anything at Stanford? C’mon, he’s basically like… I dunno, the American version of Tolkien. Not that Tolkien wrote ghost stories, but they both kind of made their own universe, you know? Most of King’s stories belong in the same world, ‘cept for The Dark Tower, but there are some characters of other stories that are in there, too. And Roland even searches for Stephen King at some point. Freakin’ genius. Meta as fuck.”

Sam continues to stare at his older brother, his salad completely forgotten. He considers getting the small bottle of holy water that’s inside his jacket (his brother suddenly talking books again is one thing, but using words as “meta”? That’s just plain weird), but decides against it.

“Dude, who are you and what did you do with my brother?” he finally says.

Dean just rolls his eyes. “Oh c’mon, really? That’s what you’re going with?”

Sam doesn’t answer him and goes back to his salad, shaking his head slightly. Of all the authors in the world, it just had to be Stephen King. As if their lives weren’t scary enough.

Later that night, when they’re back in the motel room, Sam suddenly looks up.

“You know that he wrote this one story about a car that –“

“Shuddup, Sammy. Baby would _never_ do that to me!”

…

Finding the bunker is weird. Never in all honesty have they been thinking of owning a house, let alone a secret underground HQ of some obscure supernatural-hunting boys’ club for adults. They both tried, yes; but Dean is sure that none of them actually believed they could keep their normal lives. So having the bunker is a weird in-between of both; and Dean has to admit that this is par for the course of their lives; always in between. _So it goes,_ as they like to say.

…

“Jesus Christ, Sam. You have your own freaking room, I don’t care that you don’t decorate it or whatever, could you just stop leaving your shit everywhere?”

Two seconds later, _The Great Gatsby_ comes flying out of the kitchen, hits an empty beer bottle and both come crashing down on the floor.

“That’s your fault, Sammy, I told you not to store your stupid books in the kitchen, I’m trying to clean here!”

Sam laughs, gets the book and thinks about putting _Cloud Atlas_ in Dean’s laundry basket.

…

The next time they fight and Dean leaves for a food run, Sam gathers all the books Dean hasn’t thrown at his head over the years and puts them neatly on shelves in Dean’s room. It’s as good as an apology gets between them, and when Dean comes back and sees it, he doesn’t say anything.

He _does_ make Cesar Salad for dinner, though.

…

A few days later, Shakespeare’s _A Midsummernight’s Dream_ magically appears in Sam’s room. On the front cover sticks a post-it note.

_Nice try bitch, but I’m not gay._

...

The next time Sam gets the book, it takes some time to realize what is wrong with it: there are marks that aren’t his own. Marks that were made with a pen instead of a pencil; and Sam would rather not write in books than use a freaking _pen_ , what the fuck?

“Jerk.”, he laughs and shakes his head.

At dinner the same night, Sam just cannot stop grinning every time he looks at Dean.

“The fuck, dude? Is something wrong with my face or what?”

“Nah, everything’s cool. I was just thinking,” Sam says, still grinning. His brother reads Shakespeare, that’s just too goddamn funny. Bobby would’ve _loved_ to give him shit about that.

…

Two towns over, when Sam is looking for a new flannel in one of the town’s thrift shops, he finds the complete works of Shakespeare in one book. They don’t have the money to buy it (and Dean would never admit to wanting it) but Sam gets it anyway; he’s seen a bar where you can play pool. He might not be as good as Dean when it comes to scamming money, but he’s not bad at it either.

…

He gives the book to Dean on his birthday. He says it’s a gag gift, because no way in hell would Dean keep it otherwise, but they both know that it’s not true.

But they don’t talk about that.

 

* * *

 

Before I forget: come [talk to me ](http://thefreakfox.tumblr.com/)on tumblr?

 


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